Roby Dwi Antono (b. 1990, Semarang, Indonesia) lives and works in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.​
Formerly a graphic designer, Roby’s distinct style fuses classical Renaissance imagery with contemporary Superflat aesthetics. Motifs of deadpan, starry-eyed children and bizarre mythological creatures nod to notable artists like Yoshitomo Nara as well as pop-surrealists Mark Ryden and Marion Peck. Roby sketches each of his portraits before moving to canvas with oil paint, watercolours, pencils, spray paint, and charcoal. Roby pulls references from images circulated online, epic poetry, film and cartoons. He often lifts popular iconography to reimagine cultural icons he admires such as rapper Tyler the Creator and artist Takashi Murakami. This said, Roby’s most significant influences are his memories and dreams, which inform the surrealist sensibility seen throughout his work. Interrogating the distant haze of childhood, Roby’s fantastical paintings explore themes of heroism and cultural trauma.
Roby combines memories from his past with the uncertainty of the future. Severed heads, suspended in a cosmological skyscape, a swamp juxtaposed with the sci-fi peculiarity of hybrid creatures and dismembered anatomies, the artist mixes the prehistoric and futuristic, creating a non-linear version of time and space which swells to encompass past and present, real and imagined.​
Roby interrogates the contradictions of human experience via his art. “I paint subjects that can represent both the good and the bad.” ​
Illuminating the paradoxes of our individual experiences with surreal vision and macabre humour, Roby balances disillusion and anxiety with heroism and hope to find clarity within the chaos of human experience.​